forget the limits of your skin
by Devi Lethe
Summary: By then Jack Crawford has cast his lure, dragged them gasping and bleeding into the open air. By then, Will can't read the face of the clock and Eleanor only sometimes remembers she wants to be a dog and all they know for sure is that his name is Will Graham. His name is Will Graham and she is Eleanor and they are alive.


_Hannibal - Golden Orb Weaver (f), named Anais (ah-NAH-eece) "favored grace"_  
_Will - unsettled (f), named Eleanor (EL-ah-nor) "sun, ray, shining light" from the Greek eleos "compassion"_  
_Garret Jacob Hobbs - Coyote (f), named Wendy (WEN-dee) "friend"_

* * *

Eleanor likes being a dog. It's her favorite shape, slipping over her like a blanket, like Will's hot breath in the ruff of her fur, like Hannibal's hands, so warm against the cold of the snow. She likes being a dog because it's easy. It feels safe, like nothing could ever get her.

Like Will could never reach under her skin and pull, rend and tear and reshape until she's what he wants. What he needs. When she's a dog it's simple to curl her tail around her hind legs, plop her body down between her brothers and sisters and forget she ever knew what it felt like to kill.

Dogs are good. They're messy and alive and so, so forgiving.

Eleanor would like it, probably, if she could be a dog, but eventually the phone always rings, a sound she's come to hate and fear and crave because it means her dream of being a dog is ending.

Mainly she's afraid that's all it ever was: a dream.

They're thirteen when it starts to become noticeable. When people start to eye them a little sideways, small town folk with small town minds who can't conceive of a boy strange enough not to settle. A boy with a daemon who's only mostly a girl.

Sometimes Eleanor slides over that line and it shouldn't hurt but it does because what's wrong with them? It's a decade or more before they start to understand that it's fine, it's normal, it's okay not to have a binary counterpart and by then they are so, so damaged that gender is the least of their concerns.

By then Jack Crawford has cast his lure, dragged them gasping and bleeding into the open air. By then, Will can't read the face of the clock and Eleanor only sometimes remembers she wants to be a dog and all they know for sure is that his name is Will Graham. His name is Will Graham and she is Eleanor and they are alive.

When they wake up in the middle of the road, he can't remember how he got there and she can't remember who she was. Winston is there, his tail flicking anxiously while the officer asks Will questions he can't answer.

Eleanor desperately wants to join him, press her snout into Winston's chest until his tail comes up, happy and quick to play. She aches with it, brawn and bone heavy with the weight of… fur. Fur she doesn't have to see to know is dusty gray.

She realizes what form she's wearing in the same instant Will does. His hand on her back trembles violently, clenching and unclenching without rhythm or reason as he desperately tries not to falter.

Behind them, Winston whines but won't approach.

_Nor should he,_ Hannibal whispers. _You are a predator and he is not a fool._

Wendy was a coyote before they died. Before Eleanor and Will killed them. Eleanor still remembers the taste of Wendy's fur, bitter and musty on her tongue as her jaws closed on Wendy's throat, clamped shut around her airway choking the life from her as her human lay dying across the room.

Will's fear and panic was sharp, sliding through her mind and heart like shards of ice, but Eleanor was calm itself. Her jaws didn't loosen; her muscles stood firm against the fading struggles as blood loss sapped the strength from Garret's limbs and Wendy's soul.

In her heart, Eleanor felt a fierce and wicked joy as they murdered them. And then it was over, Wendy gone as though she had never existed, Garret Jacob Hobbs a lump of meat cooling on the floor.

She can still remember the way her paws slid across the linoleum, slick with Hobbs blood. His and Abigail's, and Will with his hands that wouldn't grip _why can't he grip?_

Now, Eleanor can't remember if the brown of her fur has always been this gray or if it's something she picked up from them. There are lots of things she can't remember, like when she wound up pressed into Hannibal's leg, the heat of him a steady comfort against her shaking ribs.

Anais ticks across the back of Eleanor's neck, legs prickling and twitching in a way that shouldn't be comforting but is. She settles behind Eleanor's left ear, curling close to the skin. Her forelegs stroke absently against a strand of fur and the sound rasps in Eleanor's ear, white noise to drown out the screams.

Sometimes she pretends it works.

First, there was hate. Transference from Jack and that high brow smile and a suit that cost more than any Graham has ever made in a month. Hannibal always did like the impoverished. Soul or purse, he wasn't picky.

Will Graham meets him and hates him and within six months he's broken crying at the door, Eleanor pressing into Hannibal's thigh in a way he would find discourteous if he couldn't read desperation in every trembling line of her fleethound frame.

Just as her coat changed to reflect the late Mr. Hobbs, her shape has changed to suit him, whittled away to nothing as Will has been whittled by time and fate. By the weight of Jack Crawford's bootheel and the shrieking of a thousand innocents, dead and gone to all but poor Will.

Hannibal does not find them discourteous. Fascinating, charming, delightfully unrefined. He, himself, is polished to perfection, his gleaming facade every bit as strong as Anais's skin. Will and Eleanor are open wounds, raw and ragged and ripped open every time they have begun to heal. They are beautiful, wrapped in agony and shuddering with the ecstasy of it all.

It is his privilege to witness their becoming and his duty to ensure they do. The universe would be deprived of something beautiful if Will Graham never reached his full potential.

On the table, Anais has woven a miniature heart, the strands carefully arranged so that if she tugs in just the right way, the organ appears to beat.

"You should have built this in a box," he says.

Anais gnashes her fangs. "I don't think he needs another heart from you, Hannibal."

There are cobwebs in his hair. He finds them everywhere - on his clothes, in his shoes - but lately when he wakes up there are cobwebs in his hair and he can't remember when they were here.

Eleanor can smell them - Hannibal's cologne and Anais's venom - but there's no way to tell. Their scent is as pervasive as their presence. It's in her fur and on Will's skin. Layer upon layer overlaying their home, their lives, and no way to tell when each was laid.

Was Anais here in the night, trailing her silk through the wool of Will's hair? Or was the web from yesterday? Or the day before. Or last week. He might have rolled through it tossing and turning or she might have crept into his bed, listened to his dreams.

Hannibal might have stood over them, watched over what passes for their sleep.

Will's hand is steady in the ruff of her fur. It doesn't tremble. There is nothing uncertain when everything is a lie and so at last they have nothing to fear.

"My name is Will Graham," he says to the dark. "My name is Will Graham and you are Eleanor. We are alive."


End file.
